Rival Studios In Snow White Face-Off ~ A breakdown between the two films

Universal Pictures and Relativity Media are in a war over whose star-studded Snow White movie will hit theaters first. Amid shifting release dates and casting coups—Julia Roberts! Kristen Stewart!—there’s been little talk about the actual films. Marlow Stern analyzes the screenplays to see which flick is the fairest of them all.

It’s a story of Shakespearean—nay, Homeric—proportions: two rival Hollywood powers are currently locked in a bitter war of attrition over a cutesy, fairy-tale princess. Three months after the independent motion picture company Relativity Media acquired first-time screenwriter Melissa Wallack’s Snow White script in June 2010, major Hollywood studio Universal Pictures introduced its own revisionist take on the Brothers Grimm fairy tale, dubbed Snow White and the Huntsman.

What followed was a tinsel-town version of an arms race, as Relativity’s project landed a director, Tarsem Singh (the upcoming Immortals), followed by a series of casting coups: Julia Roberts as the evil queen, hot newcomer Lily Collins (The Blind Side) as Snow White, and Armie Hammer playing the prince. Universal then countered, casting its own Oscar winner, Charlize Theron, as the studio’s evil queen, Twilight star Kristen Stewart as Snow White, and Thor’s Chris Hemsworth as the Huntsman.

But that was just the beginning.

When Relativity announced a June 29, 2012, release date for its as-yet-untitled 3-D Snow White project, Universal announced shortly thereafter that its version would hit theaters on June 1, 2012. Refusing to be bullied by a major Hollywood studio, Relativity then went all Rocky Balboa on Universal, moving the release date of its own film all the way up to March 16, 2012.

Lost amid all the hullabaloo, however, is the most important question of all: which film project is more promising? The Daily Beast broke down each film’s screenplay to let you determine which Snow White deserves to live happily ever after. (These screenplay drafts are not confirmed shooting scripts.)